When Your Heart Is Troubled

 

Take Refuge

“You have traveled too fast over false ground;

Now your soul has come to take you back.

Take refuge in your senses, open up

To all the small miracles you rushed through.

Become inclined to watch the way of rain

Imitate the habit of twilight

Taking time to open the well of color

That fostered the brightness of day.

Draw alongside the silence of stone

Until the calmness can claim you.”

John O’Donohue

Sometimes, when I feel agitated or frustrated, I turn to poetry to calm and console me. John O’Donohue’s poems hold a special place in this. He lived in Ireland, was a priest, who loved the land and its creatures. Like Mary Oliver and Wendell Berry, he felt closer to the wild things than to most human beings. I do too. I think the reason for this is that nature is always true to itself. There is never anything false or misleading about it. It is what it is, regardless of what we humans are creating around us. The sun rises and the sun sets every day, the seasons change on schedule, the rain comes in its time and the wind blows away the dead leaves and pollen. Nature is reliable even when it is wild and rambunctious.

 Here is Wendell Berry’s best known poem:

“When despair for the world grows in me

and I wake in the night at the least sound

in fear of what my life and children’s lives may be,

I go and lie down where the wood drake

rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.

I come into the peace of the wild things

who do not tax their lives with forethought

of grief. I come into the presence of still water

and I feel above me the day-blind stars

waiting with their light. For a time

I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.”

And the incomparable Mary Oliver, from her best loved, “Wild Geese”:

“…Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.

Meanwhile the world goes on.

Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of rain

are moving across the landscapes,

over the prairies and the deep trees,

the mountains and the rivers.

Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,

Are heading home again.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

the world offers itself to your imagination,

calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting—

over and over announcing your place

in the family of things.”

My prayer for today is that these beautiful words will comfort and sustain you. Take time for your soul to catch up and bring you back to your senses. Get out in nature and remember who you are.

                                                In the Spirit,

                                                Jane